Goals: Luna 9 was designed to make a survivable landing and transmit pictures from the surface of the Moon.

Accomplishments: The spacecraft made the first survivable landing and sent first pictures from the surface of a celestial body, beating America's Surveyor lander by about four months. Luna 9's landing was harder than that of Surveyor, but good enough for its camera and radiation detector to survive and do their jobs. The mission proved that a lander would not sink into a thick layer of dust, as some models predicted.